Only 10 months after opening, NSCAD closed the fledging Dawson Printshop as a cost-saving measure. Vincenzo Ravina puts on his best typeface.

Under flickering fluorescent lights are cabinets with many
thin drawers. The labels on them read "Helvetica" and "Garamond." Here,
in the dank bowels of a building on Granville Street, the Dawson
collection is housed in more than a thousand of these drawers. Each
holds various type---little metal or wood letters that have to be
arranged on a press, ink rolled over them and pressed onto paper. This
is how printing was done before the digital era. Dawson's unique
collection of type is one of the largest in Canada, and perhaps North
America.

Above, on street level, is the Dawson Printshop, which used to be
one of the only commercial letterpress print shops in Halifax. Many
large old printing presses litter the shop. Some are very rare, like
the Vandercook Universal II proof press sitting behind the counter in
the main area.

However, due to cost cutting by NSCAD University, the Dawson ceased
operations as a commercial enterprise on April 30.

The Dawson was closed after only 10 months. Not nearly long enough
for a small business to prove itself, says former co-manager Vincent
Perez. "We experienced quite a bit of growth within those 10
months...In our last month of operations, we must have been making 10
times what we were in our first month."

After the closure, Perez moved back home to Ontario.

Perez admits the Dawson wasn't yet profitable, but he says they were
well on the way. "I did some finished projections that saw us as
profitable within, not this year, but perhaps the year after this
one."

You might have seen some of Dawson's work around the city. They
printed a lot of posters, and the cover of local arts magazine, Her
Royal Majesty.

Harriet Lye, the editor of Her Royal Majesty, says that
despite letterpress printing being more costly and time-consuming than
digital printing---500 covers took 10 hours of labour---the quality of
the work is worth it.

"Each [cover was] done by hand and... [Perez] had such a particular
and really meticulous attention to detail. Watching him work, he would
make sure everything was absolutely perfect, to the hair's
breadth."

The Dawson will continue to be used by NSCAD as a classroom, but
Perez is unsure of how well that will work, considering there is no
technician to take care of the Dawson collection and to train people to
use the presses. The closure resulted in the staff of three being let
go.

Several concerned NSCAD faculty wrote a letter telling the
administration that the Dawson Printshop and type collection needs a
technician.

Paul Maher, a NSCAD design faculty member, says, "It's a library,
but it's a library with no staff...People come and take and borrow and
return, so the onus is really on the user to put things back in a way
that other people can find it, which obviously would be untenable in a
library, but we just don't have any other option at this stage."

Perez says a technician is mandatory to "take care of this
collection that was generously donated to them, that's rare, completely
unique and that needs maintenance and guardianship... The school has to
recognize that it's a resource that needs care."

Linda Hutchison, director of university relations, alumni &
development, confirms that the Dawson was closed as a cost-cutting
measure. When asked if NSCAD would hire a technician, she says she
doesn't know. "We're not sure when we can reopen the Dawson. We
certainly hope to, when the economic climate improves. It's a wonderful
opportunity to show and display the letterpress work that's created in
the Dawson. I personally love it."

When asked about NSCAD's current debt and whether it's related to
the building of the school's waterfront Port Campus, which opened two
years ago, Hutchison says, "That's not a question I'm prepared to
answer."

But still the Dawson continues to kick, over a month after its
death. Former technician Niko Silvester says she's still taking on the
odd job. "Most of them at the moment are jobs that people had inquired
about before the shop closed, and I don't want to just say, 'Sorry, go
away, we're closed now.'"

She's frustrated, "because we were just starting to get things
going...our client list was starting to build up...and each month we
were doing a little bit better."

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